It is rare that a nation perceives itself with the identical accuracy that its offshore trading partners can. One cannot see an entire house unless one stands outside it. Israel is no exception in this regard. As a result, many, many opportunities are being missed for foreign trade and Jewish national progress.
Respecting software development, human stupidity and arrogance played a big part in Israel?s loss of market share in areas she once dominated. A decline in software exports owes much to not paying a market research firm to go around to industrial firms overseas and asking them, ?What do you need?", but instead designing a nifty, neat new device in isolation, tooling up to produce it, then telling the entire customer base, ?We don?t care about your needs. This is what we have to sell, this is what you are going to pay for it, and if you want it modified to meet your needs, that will cost extra.? But brutal class warfare was the main predator slaughtering computer software sales through sniffily ignoring the fact that the only customer of software is the just-above-minimum-wage computer operator who turns to their boss after hours and hours of trying to get the new product to work and says with a sigh of frustration, ?I am sorry. This software is garbage. I cannot figure it out.? There is no such thing as top-down marketing, just as there is no need for the workers of the world to unite to rule the world. They already do. They produce the bottom line results, always, every time, without fail, or nearly die trying. This is why software development ?easy-money? schemes now are just a near-forgotten dream of the recent past, in Israel, in America, in the world. It is well that it is. No one should pay for a 700-dollar software ?solution? that a 50-dollar typewriter can do as well or better.
So where was Israel before the ego-fuelled delusion of infinite riches from new software development smote the nation as madness smote King Saul? Doing boring, sensible things, like fine-tuning its fashion industry and textile exports, selling the blue blazes out of stainless steel fittings for American and European plumbers and pipefitters, providing upgrades and improvements to U.S. military markets for equipment the U.S.A. had just recently sold to them, creating a reputation for cultural exports, such as its limitless wealth of symphonic and popular music creation capabilities, its film exports, and developing its myriad innovations in shipbuilding and naval architectural design.
The worst damage done by the dot.com Gold Rush was the abandoning of Israel?s potential to be Europe?s and America?s most reliable and cost-effective source for affordable design and printing of quality books and magazines. There is literally no place on the planet where, as a percentage of the population, more printers and graphic layout personnel of the highest calibre abound. By rights, given aggressive marketing, there is no reason there should be a single book from New York and London and Berlin and Paris publishers printed anywhere else but Israel.
Yet at present, how far into Never-Never Land is Israel in this market? Please correct me if I am wrong, but there is not one major pulp and paper mill in the entirety of the Holy Land. This in the country of The Book, in the land of the people who gave us books to begin with, and are yet the world?s salient and leading practitioners in training and developing new technology for making the printed page more pleasing to the eye and easier on the pocketbook.
Is there any reason Israel cannot pick up where it left off? None. There is no excuse. When was Israel not under attack? The measure of a person?s worth is the quality of their enemies, and no good deed goes unpunished. How righteous, then, must Israel be. Those whom the Creator loves, He chastens. How strong, then, must that love be. The world under attack from the terrorists of Islam suffers not one one-millionth as much as Europe, Asia, and the Middle East suffered during World War II. It is therefore shameful - and America is even more guilty than Israel in this - to hide under the bed sucking one?s thumb like children because the Evil Closet Monster of radical Islam threatens. We give the Closet Monster the victory through our inaction and fear. There is nothing to fear but fear itself, and I fully credit FDR with this quotation. It applies now more than ever.
Are we now worthy to confront the memory of those who stood in the British Mandate refugee camps clutching their rope-tied cardboard suitcases, unbathed in the suits and ties or lone surviving hand-washed dresses, owning nothing but their shining dreams of the future? It is the most reprehensible of blasphemies to surrender by default the continuance of Western civilization, which is, for better or worse, the intellectual and material product of Jewish sweat, Jewish fighting, Jewish dreams, and Jewish humanitarianism. It is a civilization predicated on the rights and dignity of the common person, and without which Europe and America would have remained bestiaries populated by sacrificers of virgins to the Goddess of the Harvest, squatting in mud huts and relying on armed raids and pillaging to provide the rudest amenities of existence.
All of America, Canada, and Europe await the arrival of Jewish dreamers, marketing Luftmenschen fired with entrepreneurial visions to rebuild their worlds, the cultures of the Gentiles and the Jews, providing the realization of material progress through industrial development for which the Jews were noted in the refugee-era '30s and '40s. Why they are not there now is because the basic, simple, boring, workable and most essential products are being overlooked. Why is there no Israel-made automobile, not a luxury line aimed at nouveau riche real-estate swindlers, film moguls and world-destroying arbitragers, but at the long-suffering and heroic middle classes and working classes of these importing nations? If Japan, Korea, China, and -- horrors! -- Yugoslavia can sell into the U.S.A. auto market, where is Israel, please? Jews invented the clothing industry and literally the machinery to produce clothing, so why cannot one buy a button-down 65/35 Oxford shirt made in Israel at the local U.S. clothing store or mall? India and the former Soviet Union are making gas turbine engine parts for General Electric and Westinghouse and other American powerplant firms: why doesn?t Israel have a piece of the market?
It isn?t labor costs. It isn?t freight costs. Israeli marketing boffins aren?t going to the marketplace to talk with the customers. Here is the bravest military on the planet, the IDF, willing to throw their precious youths away for our futures, yet the Israel industrial sales force won?t get on the plane to New York, London, or L.A. to close a deal, or to make one. All of American Christendom has pledged verbally, in writing, in their prayers, on TV, and to anyone who will listen, their support of Israel. How can one then expect to find more willing potential buyers of Israel-made goods?
And where, oh where, are Israel?s marvelous symphonic compositions and musicians and performers? Israel repeatedly wins the symphonic composition contests of Europe as if it were almost a bore to them. Yet I have to cross the border into Canada from the U.S.A. to obtain Israeli symphonic recordings on C.D. The U.S. friends I have with classical music training all weep as I do for the future of the orchestra in the U.S.A. There are just so many times one can listen to Mozart, Beethoven, Bernstein and Copland. Where are your legions of Russian and Ukrainian immigrant musicians eager to edify our lives with their musical compositional output?
Roll up your sleeves, Israel, and rebuild our universe anew. Just name your price. The world needs the Jews now in the marketplace just as much as it needed Moshe Rabbeinu trudging down Mount Sinai 6,000 years ago, bearing the Law as a beacon to the future in his arms, to teach Jew and Gentile alike what it is not to be ravening beasts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walter James O?Brien writes from Everett, Washington.
Copyright 2002 Walter James O?Brien
Respecting software development, human stupidity and arrogance played a big part in Israel?s loss of market share in areas she once dominated. A decline in software exports owes much to not paying a market research firm to go around to industrial firms overseas and asking them, ?What do you need?", but instead designing a nifty, neat new device in isolation, tooling up to produce it, then telling the entire customer base, ?We don?t care about your needs. This is what we have to sell, this is what you are going to pay for it, and if you want it modified to meet your needs, that will cost extra.? But brutal class warfare was the main predator slaughtering computer software sales through sniffily ignoring the fact that the only customer of software is the just-above-minimum-wage computer operator who turns to their boss after hours and hours of trying to get the new product to work and says with a sigh of frustration, ?I am sorry. This software is garbage. I cannot figure it out.? There is no such thing as top-down marketing, just as there is no need for the workers of the world to unite to rule the world. They already do. They produce the bottom line results, always, every time, without fail, or nearly die trying. This is why software development ?easy-money? schemes now are just a near-forgotten dream of the recent past, in Israel, in America, in the world. It is well that it is. No one should pay for a 700-dollar software ?solution? that a 50-dollar typewriter can do as well or better.
So where was Israel before the ego-fuelled delusion of infinite riches from new software development smote the nation as madness smote King Saul? Doing boring, sensible things, like fine-tuning its fashion industry and textile exports, selling the blue blazes out of stainless steel fittings for American and European plumbers and pipefitters, providing upgrades and improvements to U.S. military markets for equipment the U.S.A. had just recently sold to them, creating a reputation for cultural exports, such as its limitless wealth of symphonic and popular music creation capabilities, its film exports, and developing its myriad innovations in shipbuilding and naval architectural design.
The worst damage done by the dot.com Gold Rush was the abandoning of Israel?s potential to be Europe?s and America?s most reliable and cost-effective source for affordable design and printing of quality books and magazines. There is literally no place on the planet where, as a percentage of the population, more printers and graphic layout personnel of the highest calibre abound. By rights, given aggressive marketing, there is no reason there should be a single book from New York and London and Berlin and Paris publishers printed anywhere else but Israel.
Yet at present, how far into Never-Never Land is Israel in this market? Please correct me if I am wrong, but there is not one major pulp and paper mill in the entirety of the Holy Land. This in the country of The Book, in the land of the people who gave us books to begin with, and are yet the world?s salient and leading practitioners in training and developing new technology for making the printed page more pleasing to the eye and easier on the pocketbook.
Is there any reason Israel cannot pick up where it left off? None. There is no excuse. When was Israel not under attack? The measure of a person?s worth is the quality of their enemies, and no good deed goes unpunished. How righteous, then, must Israel be. Those whom the Creator loves, He chastens. How strong, then, must that love be. The world under attack from the terrorists of Islam suffers not one one-millionth as much as Europe, Asia, and the Middle East suffered during World War II. It is therefore shameful - and America is even more guilty than Israel in this - to hide under the bed sucking one?s thumb like children because the Evil Closet Monster of radical Islam threatens. We give the Closet Monster the victory through our inaction and fear. There is nothing to fear but fear itself, and I fully credit FDR with this quotation. It applies now more than ever.
Are we now worthy to confront the memory of those who stood in the British Mandate refugee camps clutching their rope-tied cardboard suitcases, unbathed in the suits and ties or lone surviving hand-washed dresses, owning nothing but their shining dreams of the future? It is the most reprehensible of blasphemies to surrender by default the continuance of Western civilization, which is, for better or worse, the intellectual and material product of Jewish sweat, Jewish fighting, Jewish dreams, and Jewish humanitarianism. It is a civilization predicated on the rights and dignity of the common person, and without which Europe and America would have remained bestiaries populated by sacrificers of virgins to the Goddess of the Harvest, squatting in mud huts and relying on armed raids and pillaging to provide the rudest amenities of existence.
All of America, Canada, and Europe await the arrival of Jewish dreamers, marketing Luftmenschen fired with entrepreneurial visions to rebuild their worlds, the cultures of the Gentiles and the Jews, providing the realization of material progress through industrial development for which the Jews were noted in the refugee-era '30s and '40s. Why they are not there now is because the basic, simple, boring, workable and most essential products are being overlooked. Why is there no Israel-made automobile, not a luxury line aimed at nouveau riche real-estate swindlers, film moguls and world-destroying arbitragers, but at the long-suffering and heroic middle classes and working classes of these importing nations? If Japan, Korea, China, and -- horrors! -- Yugoslavia can sell into the U.S.A. auto market, where is Israel, please? Jews invented the clothing industry and literally the machinery to produce clothing, so why cannot one buy a button-down 65/35 Oxford shirt made in Israel at the local U.S. clothing store or mall? India and the former Soviet Union are making gas turbine engine parts for General Electric and Westinghouse and other American powerplant firms: why doesn?t Israel have a piece of the market?
It isn?t labor costs. It isn?t freight costs. Israeli marketing boffins aren?t going to the marketplace to talk with the customers. Here is the bravest military on the planet, the IDF, willing to throw their precious youths away for our futures, yet the Israel industrial sales force won?t get on the plane to New York, London, or L.A. to close a deal, or to make one. All of American Christendom has pledged verbally, in writing, in their prayers, on TV, and to anyone who will listen, their support of Israel. How can one then expect to find more willing potential buyers of Israel-made goods?
And where, oh where, are Israel?s marvelous symphonic compositions and musicians and performers? Israel repeatedly wins the symphonic composition contests of Europe as if it were almost a bore to them. Yet I have to cross the border into Canada from the U.S.A. to obtain Israeli symphonic recordings on C.D. The U.S. friends I have with classical music training all weep as I do for the future of the orchestra in the U.S.A. There are just so many times one can listen to Mozart, Beethoven, Bernstein and Copland. Where are your legions of Russian and Ukrainian immigrant musicians eager to edify our lives with their musical compositional output?
Roll up your sleeves, Israel, and rebuild our universe anew. Just name your price. The world needs the Jews now in the marketplace just as much as it needed Moshe Rabbeinu trudging down Mount Sinai 6,000 years ago, bearing the Law as a beacon to the future in his arms, to teach Jew and Gentile alike what it is not to be ravening beasts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walter James O?Brien writes from Everett, Washington.
Copyright 2002 Walter James O?Brien